After 9
by Great Thumbs of Wisdom
Summary: After the war. After the struggle against the machines. After the stitchpunks. Only he was left, 9, to view the very end of the world. And even he was only temporary. After him there was nothing.


**Life is fragile. It teeters on the brink of destruction. And beyond destruction, there is nothing. It cannot be brought back.**

**_"Maybe the world is what we make of it. But after us there will be nobody left to make anything of it."_ - 7's last words to 9**

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The stitchpunks were gone now. The machines too. Now only the ancient, teetering ruins of humanity's cities remained, and he along with them. He was the sole surviving form of life left on the planet, though decreipt with age and his burlap skin nearly gone. It hung from his bones, his fragile skeleton of machinery and rust, sun bleached and ragged. Only his staff supported him now, a metal pole ate through with rust.

The lone threadbare figure roamed, slowly and feebly, across the wasteland. Wild storms of dust still swept the emptiness, but rain also flowed across the pitted land. He could not stand it, so weak and fragile as he was, but he watched the storms from whatever shelter he could find, swathed in ancient rags to replace the burlap that hung like cobwebs from his bones.

Nothing would ever grow here again, he had long ago realized. Even the souls of the other stitchpunks, scattered to the sky and winds, could not bring back the dead. The gas bombs of the machines had reached even into the earth; he had searched and searched, but he had never found a single patch of green. Nothing like the paintings he had seen so long ago with the others.

The whole world was a blasted, ruinous pit. Sometimes, in fact often, he wondered if there was still oxygen left on the planet. Metals rusted and masonry crumbled steadily with the slow decay of time, so he could at least assume some remained. But every trace of it consumed could not be replaced, as there were no plants to produce it. Undoubtedly it was stale and useless to organic lifeforms.

It was good, then, that he did not have to breathe the air. Though he had vehemently denied it at first, all the stitchpunks had been nothing more than sentient machines, not much more than a step above the robotic horrors they had struggled so hard to destroy. They had had souls, of course. But they could not eat, nor reproduce, nor fall ill. The sickly air could not have ever killed them. Only violence and the passing of time could accomplish that.

He had accepted that time would kill him. After all, he had been roaming this world for longer than he could track; how long had it been since the last few had died? Decades? Centuries? He could not tell, for the tortured red sun was almost never visible, and when it was the clouds and the ruined atmosphere distorted it like the reflection in a warped mirror.

The lonely stitchpunk had no idea how long it would take him to die, only that it would be soon. It was for that reason that he had returned here, to the place where it had all begun, and where it had ended.

The burned out cathedral was long gone now. Only the a few skeletal metal beams, rusted clean through, remained to mark the place where so many trinkets and hopes had been burned to the ground. He paid the place little notice, using it only as a vantage point, since a hill had formed over its rubble, to survey the rest of the city.

Alas, his tired eyes could see little and only a short distance. The weak stitchpunk only knew that what he thought had been in a direction he had long ago memorized. But the landmarks he had used to sight off of and direct him were long gone. In years long past they had tumbled to the ground and been swallowed by the bone dry dirt, layered through countless sandstorms and cemented by rains.

Where was it?

Only a few structures still stood, though most were buried too far to discern what they had once been. But the ancient library, carved from marble and set on solid foundations, was still there. Numerous weathered pillars still stretched to the sky. A marble hand, possibly still attached to its buried statue, seemed to reach up from the dirt like a living thing. The last desperate grasp for life before slipping into the void forever. The stitchpunk had seen enough, and now he knew where to go.

It was still there. The Great Machine. It had outlasted even the carefully erected cemetary of the stitchpunks that had killed it. A final irony, one last cold, heartless laugh. Its great skeletal frame was silhouetted against the empty horizon, a mockery to the lives that had been given to destroy it. It would outlast them all, for even in death, the Scientest's first creation would stand until the end of time. It seemed not to rust, or at least to rust very slowly. After all, the humans had made for it a body that would last; money was no object for such an entity as the B.R.A.I.N.

The stitchpunk regarded the callous framework, the great arms reaching to the sky and disappearing into the earth. Twisted metal rose up from its center, the great orb where the real machine had been housed. For a long time he simply stared, feeble optics straining to take in the awful sight of it.

Finally he fell to his knees.

"Why? Why did you have to destroy this beautiful world?" he asked it in a broken, pleading voice. His voice was old, the box that controlled it weary and rusting like the rest of him. "Why did you have to ruin it? Why?"

The machine did not answer. It was long dead.

"Why?" he pleaded.

The dust swirled in the air as the wind blew, tugging at the threadbare ragdoll's feebly body. The rags he had worked so hard to collect and preserve blew away, whipping into the wind that carried it into the distance, to the horizon.

The stitchpunk removed the talisman from within his withered body. The zipper on his front would not open; it was locked with rust. But there was not enough thread around it to necessitate forcing that zipper open.

He looked at the talisman for a long time before he decided to open it. Even after all the time he had spent in the wasteland it remained untarnished, as well-crafted and mystical looking as the day he had awoken with it. The source of his life and of the Great Machine's. The paradoxical giver and taker of life. Without it none of this world's present problems would have ever existed. Yet it had also given life... but in the end, even this life could not last. The talisman had created a world that could not exist.

Finally, the stitchpunk opened the talisman and carefully placed it on the ground. He looked at the Great Machine one last time, remembering its unreasonable hatred of his kind and the humans that had proceeded him. And then he pressed the buttons.

The talisman sprang even wider open, its alchemical symbols glowing a bright green that illuminated the lengthening shadows cast by thickening clouds.

Struggling to raise his head, the stitchpunk looked up at those clouds. Droplets of rain pittered and pattered about him, pluming dust that swirled in a great sea across the land. Then he looked down. The machine remained, unmoving. Eternal.

9 closed his eyes.

This was the end.

"Receive me, my friends," he said silently, not realizing that his voice box had finally died, that his words had never left him. All he knew was memories, of the other stitchpunks and of lives that had preceded him in a world that he had never known. Faces flashed before him; of the Scientest, of the twins 3 and 4, of amiable 2, of faithful 5, towering 8 and obstinate 1. Of 7, her face beautiful as never before in the moment of death, though time had laid it bare.

And then the light took him, lifting up his body to the sky as if it were as light as a feather, bearing him up into the heavens to dwell there with all the souls that had come before him. He who had seen beyond the last days of the earth.

_9._

--

**R&R please.**


End file.
